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December 23, 2016

"Gorgeous Nothings" Envelope poems and paintings

This morning I came across a review of the book The Gorgeous Nothings, whichhighlights Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems. I was immediately reminded of the Envelope Paintings of my Facebook friend and artist Julia Schwartz, so I thought I'd share.

If I could curate a show with all of these lovely pieces side by side I would! Here is the full article which was posted by Tupelo Quarterly and written by Hannah Star Rogers. Sounds like a good idea for a last minute Christmas gift too!

Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings offers an incredible
inquiry into the material practice of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and an
argument for why we should take not just the visual culture of poetry
into account, as so many new editions of Dickinson’s poetry do, but also
the materiality—as both constraint and possibility.The Gorgeous Nothings, from Christine Burgin/New Directions,
edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin with a preface by Susan Howe, is
the first publication of Emily Dickinson’s complete envelope writings in
facsimile from her visually-oriented manuscripts, rendered here in full
color and arranged as if they were pressed into a scrapbook. The book
is no doubt the dream of poetry and visual culture scholars (very
literally as it took Werner, a Dickinson scholar, and Bervin, a visual
artist, to bring the book together), but beyond important academic
contributions, this book is a lot of fun to open and toss through as
though it was a box of Grandmother’s letters—if your grandmother was the
Belle of Amherst.
The editors made great choices that allow us these pleasures: the
facsimiles are collected together in such a way that we can enjoy the
puzzle. The book replicates the material experience of opening an
archive, while the shape of the envelope and text is detailed for
legibility in schematics that reflect the envelopes’ shape and
dimensions. A 252 gives us a sense of the Dickson we recognize, while
adding an the extra layer of the material constraints of the envelope:
What is added by knowing that Dickson met the corner of the page with
the word “power,” and arranged her lines to fill the space, gives us a
new sense of the space that the poem occupies and of her agility in
working not only in acoustic constraints and vital rhythms, but also in
another layer of formal concerns. Even a glance at the forms of the
envelopes tells the reader something magical is happening in the details
of the poems:
Dickinson’s work has been unfolding for us slowly, revealing her
mastery in new ways. First, as Howe writes in the preface, in the 1951
Johnson edition with those characteristic amazing capitals and dashes,
then with the word lists of alternate possibilities, and finally, here,
with the full materiality of her envelope letters. Maybe it is only now
that the reading world is ready to embrace the found and the forgotten
in this work, that we are really ready to revel in the glory of the
envelope poems. Our own material turn is making these artworks no longer
something difficult or illegible, but a celebration of the parts of her
poetry that only words not born in typeface can offer.
What may not be immediately legible in the material constraints
surely informed the publication choices regarding what parts of the
manuscripts would be preserved. These acts of legitimation may have been
a part of creating the Emily Dickinson legacy. Perhaps “scraps” (the
Dickinson community’s easy reference word for these poems) did not a
major poet make, particularly if they came from a woman who largely
wrote for herself. In any case, the poetry universe is certainly ready
for a revised visual understand of Dickinson’s work that this text
brings us.
Yet another wrinkle in the story of why this is the moment for
considering the material elements of these poems may be the digitization
project at Amherst College’s Archives & Special Collections, which
preceded this edition. Poets (and indeed humanists more generally) are
being asked often to account for the effects of technology on their
work. In this case, the appearance of Dickinson’s work in a digital form
precedes an important account of new dimensions of her poetry. Rather
than simply spreading copies of her work more broadly, as in so many
digital humanities projects, a real discovery and novel way of thinking
of Dickinson’s work has been revealed by its digitization. Of course, it
has long been possible to imagine an exhibit (as Howe does) or color
copies of these poems being created for a book, but the ease and
availability of scanning may have given both affordance and occasion to
study the material aspects of this work.
Bervin’s essay also leads us toward a new image of Dickinson. Rather
than a poet grabbing at envelopes when she was struck by inspiration,
Bervin calls our attention to the variety of ways the envelops are
folded and cut, suggesting that the poet had prepared these envelops in
advance for the moment when an inspiration struck. Her lines flow across
surfaces that we perceive only by her attention to them: stops at
corners or folds and changes in handwriting and letter size to
accommodate her poems to the space the material alots, while
transforming the envelope to make spaces for words which readers might
not see without the poet filing them. This preparation points not just
to thrift, but to how Dickinson perceived her poems as objects rendered
with care, what Howe calls, “visual productions.”
This curation of the envelope poems reveals the way the poet turned
the borders of the envelopes that she cut and tore into shapes to write
on into constraints to complicate her poems: making them fascinating
visual objects. Like metrics, rhythms, and rhymes which structure as
they aestheticize, Dickinson’s envelope offered her a new method for
inspiration. The folds and corners of her thrifty paper uses create new
layer of self-imposed limitation which generated new possibilities for
the poem. The Gorgeous Nothings is proof that one of our most important poets can still amaze and teach us new thing about the practice of poetry.

"It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc...The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written... I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive."Excerpt from Mary Oliver's essay Of Power And Time